Nineteenth-century English—an overview | Oxford English Dictionary Nineteenth-century English—an overview The science of language For many people the nineteenth century was a time of profound and accelerated change, one in which, as the poet and writer Thomas Arnold remarked, it seemed possible to live ‘the life of three hundred years in thirty’ (Letters on the Social Conditions of the Operative Classes, 1831-2). Industrialization, urbanization, as well as the emergence of new technologies and new scientific discoveries all meant that the realities of daily life differed markedly between 1800 and 1900. Education and levels of literacy levels also experienced significant change. Revolutions in printing technology moreover meant that books and newspapers could be produced faster—and more cheaply—than ever before; the ramifications of the General Education Act of 1870 (by which all children in Britain received compulsory schooling) meanwhile meant that, by 1900, more people than ever before were able to read. As in previous eras, language serves as an admirable witness to both history and change.

Nineteenth-century conflicts such as the Crimean War (1854-6) are memorialized in words such as cardigan (named after James Brudenell , seventh earl of Cardigan who led the Charge of the Light Brigade) and balaclava (which derives from the name of a Crimean village near Sebastopol). Words such as bloomer and blue-stocking (as well as emancipatress) conversely still evoke the history of very different battles, and the various conflicts which surrounded female dress, education, and independence. Communications and contact While the horse-drawn stage-coach (and indeed the horse-drawn cab) continued in use, new verbs such as to omnibus and to train also succinctly confirm the changing nature of communication and travel. By the end of the century, the bus (the form omnibus was swiftly shortened while the plural omnibi proved spectacularly short-lived) was powered by motor rather than horses. The motor car was also in evidence, though what exactly this new mode of transport should be called remained a matter for debate: A name has not yet been found for horseless carriages … The latest suggestion we have had is ‘motor car’.

Daily Chronicle (25 October 1895) Rail and railways perhaps offered the most extensive changes, providing a ready means of long-distance geographical mobility which spanned the nation by the end of the century. The first passengers travelled by train in 1825 and within twenty years the Times spoke of this ‘present railway age’ (9 August 1845). A host of other new expressions and idioms testify to the pervasiveness (and popularity) of railway transport in the era of steam. Railway porter, -tunnel, or –platform were, for instance, joined by the railway bookstall from which one could purchase cheap railway novels, or the railway sandwiches one could consume, as well as the hazards of what was known as railway spine (‘a disorder characterized by pain in the back … occurring especially after a railway accident’). Ships were also revolutionized by steam. By 1821, Sir Walter Scott was already enthusiastically commending the speed by which a journey to London from Edinburgh could be achieved: [We] can now make the journey in the Steam ship within 60 hours and without any fatigue thus beating the mail coach with the full advantage of sleep and stretching of limbs.

letter to his son, 6 July 1821 Communication in terms of the written and spoken word meanwhile saw other patterns of transformation. The invention of the electric telegraph (and the telegram – an American coinage which dates from the early 1850s) has been described as the nineteenth-century equivalent of the internet; for the first time, language could be transmitted—at unprecedented speed—without the need for face-to-face interaction. Fast long-distance linguistic communication became a reality. A submarine cable linked Dover and Calais by 1851 while in the United States, Western Union built its first transcontinental telegraph line in 1861. The introduction of the telephone (which quickly generated its own verb to telephone) presented similar opportunities for spoken language; direct speech no longer required the physical presence of the speaker in the same room as the person or persons being addressed. Back to top Local and global English The changing pace of communication (as well as the introduction of mass education) could, however, also bring new anxieties, not least that local dialects might disappear.

The belief that traditional regional dialects needed to be recorded before they died out led to a range of scholarly investigations—and a spate of new books and articles on local varieties of English. Railways, telegraph, and School Boards—steam, electricity, and education—are surely killing dialects, even though of late years much attention has been paid to their preservation. John Nicholson, The Folk Speech of East Yorkshire (1889) In 1873 the English Dialect Society was formed, with the remit of gathering as much information as possible on regional English. The English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905), edited by Joseph Wright , shared a similar impetus. Its six volumes aimed to represent the ‘complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during the last two hundred years’. Urban dialects—associated as they were with the spread of towns, cities, and industrialism—could nevertheless attract very different reactions. The legitimacy of different varieties could therefore be a matter of marked dissent. If some writers tried to provide a history for regional varieties which paralleled that of the standard variety, others insisted on the need for suppression and disuse.

It is an error, very common to the district between Rotherham and Barnsley, to use wrong verbs, &c. Such expressions as the following are very common: — ‘I were running,’ ‘We was running,’ ‘We’m running,’ meaning ‘We am running,’ …. The Teacher should point out to his pupils the erroneous expressions of their own locality, and endeavour to eradicate them. William Pearson, The Self-Help Grammar of the English Language (1865) At the same time the global reach of English was extraordinary. The nineteenth century was the heyday of the British empire which, by 1900, covered twenty per cent of the world’s land surface and encompassed some 400 million people. The number of speakers of English is estimated to have risen from 26 million in 1800 to over 126 million over the same time.

This figure also, of course, includes English speakers in North America who had shed the legacies of empire, and whose language, as the Connecticut-born lexicographer Noah Webster argued, now needed equally independent reference models: It is not only important, but in a degree necessary, that the people of this country should have an American Dictionary of the English Language … No person in this country will be satisfied with the English definitions of the words congress, senate, and assembly … for although these are words used in England, yet they are applied in that country to express ideas which they do not express in this country. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) The crosscurrents between these different varieties nevertheless often still remained in evidence. American vocabulary, for example, readily crossed the Atlantic, bringing words such as the inventive absqatulate (‘to decamp’) as well as elements which gradually became core elements of the English lexicon, such as enthuse , or which reflected American inventions (Kodak, sewing-machine). Budgerigar derived from Australian English , as did other terms for once unfamiliar flora and fauna (such as galah and kookaburra). Indian English was a particularly fertile form of new words.

Victoria, crowned queen of Great Britain and Ireland in 1837, was proclaimed empress of India in 1876. Terms such as amah, ayah, and tiffin still recall this phrase of cultural history, as do words such as bungalow (originally from Hindustani) and juggernaut, a word which, paradoxically, has come to denote a large lorry in English but which actually derives from a name for the Hindu deity, Krishna (in Sanskrit, it signifies ‘lord of the universe’). By 1890, as the editor of Webster’s International Dictionary explained, the sense of an English which reached beyond an individual national variety was clear: We recognize that the language of the mother-country now encircles the globe; that the literature of each of its branches is the common possession of all. Noah Porter, Webster’s International Dictionary (1890) Back to top Recording the language Thanks to the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison in the late 1870s—the ‘new wonder of the day’, as Lewis Carroll enthusiastically described it—the nineteenth century remains the first in which we are able to hear the ways in which the spoken language was actually used.

Recordings of the poet Alfred Tennyson and of the nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale, for example, still preserve intact the voices of the past. The sense that dictionaries too should record the realities of language in use (rather than an idealized and normative version of words and meaning) was to be another important shift. In 1857, Archbishop Richard Chenevix Trench delivered two lectures to the London Philological Society in which he stressed that the dictionary-maker was to be ‘an historian, not a critic’. In future the dictionary-maker should describe the objective facts of language rather than aiming to provide, as had often been the case in earlier works, a range of subjective opinions about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ usage. Chenevix Trench redefined the ‘good’ dictionary in a similar way: A Dictionary, then, according to that idea of it which seems to me alone capable of being logically maintained, is an inventory of the language … It is no task of the maker of it to select the good words of a language. If he fancies that it is so, and begins to pick and choose, to leave this and to take that, he will at once go astray.

Richard Chenevix Trench, On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries (1857) Trench’s lectures underpinned the making of the Oxford English Dictionary or, as its original title stated: A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Its first part, covering the words in ‘A’ to ‘Ant’, edited by James Murray , appeared in 1884 and by 1900 it had reached words beginning with ‘I’. As Murray noted, the ‘first aim of the Dictionary’ was to ‘exhibit the actual variety of usage’—and to act as a neutral witness to language as it had been used from 1150 to the present day. Back to top A changing language: grammar and new words It is received wisdom in many histories of the language that relatively little change took place between the English of 1800 and that of the twentieth century. The perceptions of nineteenth-century speakers might well have been rather different. Indeed, change on all levels of linguistic organization was apparent, whether in terms of spelling and sound, or syntax and meaning.

While James Murray and his co-editors on the OED sought, as we have seen, to record language in all its forms with apparent equanimity, the rise of new tenses, or new words and meanings could, for other writers, prompt highly negative reaction—and overt resistance. Change from this perspective could be viewed less as evidence of the continued vitality of a living language, but as ‘degeneration’ and carelessness. I regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable talented stealing out of the newspapers into the leading reviews and most respectable publications of the day. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table-Talk (1833) In the context of grammar one interesting nineteenth-century change was the rise of the progressive passive. This new construction—as in ‘the ship is being built’—was at first used alongside the older construction (‘Every body here is talking of a Steam Ship which is building at Leghorn’, as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in a letter in 1819). But by the end of the century, the new form was clearly dominant. Popular estimations of correctness (and ‘good’ English) were nevertheless often at odds with evidence of actual usage.

Resistance to the progressive passive continued to be expressed across the century, while the decline of the subjunctive after ‘if’ or ‘unless’ (‘if I were’/ ‘if I was’; ‘unless I be’/ ‘unless I am’) proved another source of prescriptive concern. The increasing use of got (‘it got broken’) was taken as further evidence of linguistic deterioration, as was the split infinitive, a construction which also emerges as a popular shibboleth at this time—in spite of its widespread use, as by the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell : In such conversation as was then going on, it is not necessary to accurately define the meaning of everything that is said. Wives and Daughters (1867) In the context of new words, a number of cross-currents are evident in the vocabulary, from the temporary presence of fashionable French words such as intime or bêtise (often used—at least intentionally—by the speaker or writer to signal a certain status or prestige), to the often polysyllabic and scholarly coinages which marked the language of science. Science (and the scientist as a practitioner of science) are in fact particularly emblematic of language and innovation in the nineteenth century.

Scientists had previously been known as natural philosophers, but a new emphasis on empirical and inductive methodology led to a perceived need for change: 1840 WHEWELL Philos. Induct. Sci. I. Introd. 113 We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist. Innovations in terminology were widespread, indicating the increasing precision of scientific enquiry and investigation. Medical advances led to the introduction of anaesthesia and anaesthetics, of chloroform (as both noun and verb), as well as now fundamental tools such as the stethoscope. Types of illness and disease were also classified with a newly rigorous specificity, as in the striking prevalence of the suffix –itis to denote ‘inflammation of’. Appendicitis was first recorded in 1886, slightly too late for the relevant section of the OED which had appeared in the previous year, while other nineteenth-century coinages include conjunctivitis, bronchitis, and colitis.

New terms such as biology, climatology, and ethnology (‘the science which treats of races and peoples, and their relations to one another’) also gave increasing prominence to –ology as a suffix, signalling newly specialized areas of study. The History of English: Spelling and Standardization (Suzanne Kemmer) Spelling and Standardization in English: Historical Overview Writing systems and alphabets in England English has an alphabetic writing system based on the Roman alphabet that was brought to Anglo-Saxon England by Christian missionaries and church officials in the 600s. An earlier Germanic writing system called runes, also alphabetic and originating ultimately from the same source as the Roman alphabet, was used for more limited purposes (largely incantations, curses, and a few poems) when the tribes were still on the continent and also after their migration to Britain, up until Christianization. Alphabetic writing systems are based on the principle of representing spoken sound segments, specifically those at the level of consonants and vowels, by written characters, ideally one for each sound segment.

Crucial elements of the sound stream of a message are thus 'captured' by a linear sequence of marks that can be "sounded out" to recapture the message by means of its sounds. The entire sound stream is not captured, but enough of it is to provide a prompt for lexical recognition. (Other kinds of writing systems are based on written representation of other linguistic units such as syllables, words, or some mix of these.) The Roman alphabet and Anglo-Saxon The Roman alphabet, being designed for a language with a very different phonological system, was never perfectly adapted for writing English even when first used to represent Anglo-Saxon. The first monks writing English using Roman letters soon added new characters to handle the extra sounds. For example, the front low vowel /æ/ of Anglo-Saxon was represented by a ligature of a and e, forming a single written character called ash. They also added a few runic characters to the alphabet to represent consonant sounds not found in Latin or its Romance descendents, such as the fricatives thorn þ, eth ð, and yogh ȝ (a voiced palatal or velar fricative, represented by a character that looks somewhat like a 3).

Later on in the medieval period these runic characters were replaced with digraphs, two-letter symbols such as th, sh, and gh. The letters in these digraphs do not have their usual values, but are used as a complex to indicate single sounds. Writing in Anglo-Saxon: Variation and incipient standardization Norms for writing words consistently with an alphabetic character set are collectively called orthography. Consistency in writing was never absolute in Anglo-Saxon because the whole system was new and norms for writing words in a consistent way took time to develop. It is not easy for writers to remember a single orthographic representation, called a spelling, for a word; yet this is what is required for standardization, unless there is a perfect one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, which is an ideal rarely reached with alphabetic systems. Writers seem to prefer to produce written forms they have seen before for specific words, even if there is not a good match between written characters and sounds. From the reader's perspective, we might think that simply pronouncing a word based on the prompts provided by the graphemes would be enough to allow a reader to produce a spoken message matching the written form.

Yet it turns out that producing the sound of an utterance by reading it off from the graphemes is no simple cognitive task. Getting a pronunciation out of alphabetic writing requires people to analyze the sound string down to the level of component sounds. Yet this type of phonemic analysis is apparently not an obvious or natural one for humans; it needs to be taught intensively before it can be done fairly automatically and that is one reason why acquisition of literacy at an early age is stressed in cultures with alphabetic writing. It takes a lot of practice to reliably decode messages from alphabetic writing. Some of those who try to learn to read alphabetic writing never master it because they can't separate the speech string into individual segments, which are clusters of vocal gestures in consonants and vowels, in this way. Syllables apparently are a more natural unit for humans to perceive and hence code (write) and decode (read) by means of marks on a page. Reading is also apparently swifter the more familiar the form of the written words are. A word in a spelling the reader has seen before is easier and quicker to recognize than one not seen before. Also reading is apparently quicker the less variation there is in the forms of words.

(But there is much individual variation on this last point.) The manuscripts were apparently normally read aloud, rather than internally as most reading is now done. That means the process of reading was slow enough that variation in the visual forms did not seriously detract from production of the sounds as prompted by the written characters. With reading 'to oneself', the process is potentially swifter once the reader has mastered the system; but variation can then slow it down. If there was ever consistency at the start of the use of the Roman alphabet for representing Anglo-Saxon, it began to lessen immediately. The novelty of the alphabetic system as a technology, the lack of fixed norms for written representations, and the changes over time of the language were all forces that led to greater divergence of the written forms from the spoken string. Add to that dialect variation: Some of the scribes came from outside Wessex, and even when they tried to write so as to approximate Wessex sounds, their own local pronunciations often affected the characters they wrote. Scholars observe the dialect features of individual manuscripts to gain clues about where the manuscript was composed and/or copied.

There was at that time no strong countervailing force leading toward standardization, i.e reduction of variation, such as would come later. Spellings are so variable that to lessen the difficulties modern readers may have, Old English texts are generally "normalized", or printed in accordance with what scholars think is a good representative form for each word. Manuscripts were produced in fairly large numbers by monks copying originals using quill pens, ink, and, as the writing surface, prepared sheepskins (parchment) or the much more expensive and high quality calfskins (vellum). The physical technology of this system hardly changed for 800 years. During that time some norms arose for spelling (incipient standardized spellings, although still by our standards highly variable), but the sounds of the language were changing faster. As usual with written languages, norms for writing lagged behind those for pronunciation, thus providing another source of divergence of the written form from the spoken. Although the royal court was in Winchester, other regional centers of government and/or learning arose or continued developing, such as York, Peterborough, Jarrow - and at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, just before the conquest, London.

The first three of these centers tended to have their own orthographic norms based on Northern pronunciations. Thus there was no single center for the development of orthographic norms, although the royal court in the south exerted a powerful force for normalization. The period after the conquest: Spelling during the Middle English period The Norman Conquest and its aftermath changed the entire social and governmental structure. It also affected spelling greatly, for various reasons. The most obvious is that the use of English in written documents was greatly reduced. English was no longer the dominant language for law and government, so the tendency toward standardization for Anglo-Saxon writing was essentially stopped in its tracks. Some English was still written, but far less than before. With no schools and monasteries teaching ways of writing Old English, any incipient norms were swept away and people hardly literate in the language just tried to spell as the words sounded, with predictably irregular results. Second, after the conquest many scribes were French or French-trained. Their norms for representing sounds were different in many respects.

The letter c, for example, was used in French to spell an /s/ sound in many loanwords of Latin origin; the letter c in the Roman writing system represented a /k/, but a sound change in Latin turned /k/ into /s/ before front non-low vowels. (Thus Latin civitas /kiwitas/ evolved into French cité, from where we get our word city.) From many instances like this one, the use of a single letter c to represent the radically different sounds /k/ and /s/ came into the English spelling system (and persists to this day). The /s/ variant developed by assimilation and weaking of the original /k/ in particular contents. A similar sound change when Latin was changing into the Romance languages gave rise to the use of the letter g for both a /g/ sound and a /dȝ/ sound, as in goat vs. gesture. Like the split of the early /k/ sound into /k/ and /s/, this split of Latin /g/ was induced by assimilation of the /g/ before front non-low vowels, in which the sound took on the frontness of the following vowel.

And like the split of /k/, the orthographic mismatch of the letter /g/ and the sounds it stood for was imported into English via the introduction during Middle English of large numbers of French loanwords with the new /dȝ/ sound in them. Third, the conquest brought about a change in the dialect taken as the standard. The seat of the royal court and government moved to London after the conquest. (Edward the Confessor built his beloved Westerminster Abbey in Westminster, then just down the river to the west of the Roman and Saxon settlements of London, and used buildings around the abbey as a seasonal court. The Conqueror built a whole court complex around the abbey, which thus became the center of government.) As a result the new pronunciation norms were derived from London English and not from ancestral Wessex which was in the West Country. Many manuscripts were re-copied into the newly important London dialect of the ruling classes. Older spelling norms were abandoned for new ones based on London pronunciations. Writing had been used for governmental purposes from the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon era, but for a long time its chief use remained in the church.

After the conquest it was used more and more for governmental purposes, centered in the royal court and law courts. The Court of Chancery in London became the seat of official record-keeping, and by the 1300s spelling norms were developing noticeably, in a written variety called Chancery English. The rise of two important centers of learning outside London, Oxford and Cambridge, by the 1300s affected written norms as well. These towns had somewhat different dialects, but they were still relatively close to each other and to the court, and many of the spelling norms developed there could also be applied to writing the London dialect. The triangle of London-Oxford-Cambridge, with its revolving scholarly and clerical workforce, became a large and important center of developing orthographic norms. Printing and the beginnings of the information revolution The advent of printing in the late 1400s drastically changed the speed at which manuscripts could be produced and therefore disseminated, and the adoption of paper also helped to make written documents cheaper and more widespread. These factors encouraged the growth of record-keeping and bureaucracy and the continued growth in importance of the Court of Chancery and Chancery English.

Property records, tax-collecting and other financial records, laws, and records of crime and punishment all burgeoned in the 1500s. The rise of schools, designed to train not only religious workers but also secular clerical workers for government, made it possible to train larger numbers of people in literacy and thereby also further spread the developing norms for orthography. The growth of London and its role in public institutions ensured its importance as the center of a linguistic standard for the developing nation. Standard written norms based on London English developed and were used even where local pronunciations were hardly affected by the sounds of spoken London English. Documents moved around in far greater numbers than people and thus could influence the norms of the region more easily than the spoken dialect features of travellers. The growth of a professionalized class of printers outside of the direct control of church and government led to the role of printers in setting norms of writing and spelling. Printers had a strong interest in standardization to reduce variation and hence make the printing process easier. The printing profession evolved into the profession of publishing, and publishers have been important ever since in the setting of written standards.

During the 1500s, a major upheaval in the pronunciation of English vowels, the Great English Vowel shift, spread through the speech community and tore the conservative written forms of the long vowels away from their changing pronunciations, leaving English with a set of letter-to-written vowel correspondences different from everywhere else in Europe, as well as internal variation that bedevils readers in pairs like divine, divinity. At about the same time, many inflectional endings were reduced and finally eliminated, notably many final unstressed e's. These "silent e's" were continued in the spelling system but repurposed as a tool to signal the value of the long vowels changed in the Great Vowel Shift (e.g. in mate, name, while etc.). Other sounds were reduced then eliminated, such as the k's and g's in the old clusters kn and gn (as in knight and gnat) and some of the remnants of Old English yogh, the old velar fricative (as in neighbor and bough). The result is the numerous set of "silent letters" that learners find so maddening.

By the late 1500s, under the impetus of printing the tremendous variety of spellings in written English had shaken down into a far smaller set of variants, and a great part of the outlines of the modern orthography was in place. Changes in orthographic norms slowed considerably, and Modern English was left with a spelling system from an earlier period of its history: essentially it is a normalized Middle English system. The result is a set of letter-to-sound mismatches greater than those of elsewhere in Europe, even in some respects greater than those of French, whose spelling was codified a little later. The Reformation and Renaissance In the late 1500s England became a Protestant country. As part of the new doctrine and its administration, new documents were needed such as liturgies for the recently-established Church of England, the Book of Common Prayer, and above all, English translations and copies of the Bible. The push for an accessible version of Scripture, which meant an English Bible, began a few centuries earlier but was thwarted until the church and government adopted the basic tenets of the Reformation.

A number of versions of the scripture in English were produced in the late 1500s, but the culmination of this trend was the King James Bible of 1611. This was the most influential and most widespread religious document of the age, and the norms adopted by the translators and printers of this Bible had an immense influence on writers. Dictionaries and Other Linguistic Reference Materials With the growing use of written language, the need was felt for materials that presented aspects the language in a way that could be looked up by all who desired information about the language: first, non-native speakers and later also native speakers of the language who wanted to know about newly developed parts of the language that were not part of every native speakers' knowledge. The first dictionaries were essentially lists of "hard words", particularly the large number of new loanwords from the Classical languages and also from the new colonies overseas. By the 18th century dictionary-writing was becoming a recognized activity and scholars and other learned men were being commissioned by publishers to write such materials. Elsewhere in Europe language academies were established to codify and normalize all aspects of language.

This trend did not catch on in English-speaking lands and there has never been an officially recognized academy for standardization either in Britain or the U.S. There was however an English version of the trend towards "language purification" that swept European countries through the Renaissance and Enlightenment. (This trend never fully died out in the English speaking world, and we see its echoes in prescriptivist movements that seek to minimize foreign influences, which are viewed as threats, probably for nationalistic and ethnic-based reasons. Since languages do not degenerate but only change with the needs of their speakers, it is difficult to see how one language could actually be threatened as long as it has speakers--especially one such as English with such a numerous body of speakers. A language can be threatened or endangered only if it ceases to be used at all.) Jonathan Swift was a vocal proponent of English language purification, but as is usual with purifiers, his knowledge of the history of the language was faulty and his beliefs about the reasons for particular norms and why they had to be upheld were irrational. The publication of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language was a milestone in the development of dictionary and reference materials.

It adopted a more-or-less descriptivist stance which is very modern, and at odds with the prescriptive views of earlier producers of dictionaries. Johnson's recognition of change as a normal process and his refusal to see it as degeneration was novel and important. By the time of Johnson's dictionary, the spelling system in place was recognizably that of current Modern English, with only a few orthographic peculiarities such as the spelling of show as shew and the use of the "long S" character (easily confused with the f of that time). Probably the typefaces in use at the time give more appearance of difference with modern texts than any of the remaining spelling differences between 18th century English and contemporary British English. The political independence of the United States in the 1770s led to a push towards identifying distinguishing cultural factors. Language was an obvious way of distinguishing Americans from Britons, since a recognizable set of American pronunciation features had already developed.

However, instead of using pronunciation differences to try to develop a separate written standard, Noah Webster wrote a dictionary containing some regional, American-dialect based definitions to set it apart, and also introduced into his dictionary and other writings a set of spellings that put a distinctive stamp on American orthography without changing it too much for mutual intelligibility. In other words, most of the spelling conventions that had solidified in the British standard written form by the early 19th century were maintained by Webster, but he added a few systematic differences: Using -ize instead of -ise for verbs derived from Greek verbs in -izein; eliminating u in the suffix -our (thus moving it away from the French-derived spelling of Middle English to a spelling somewhat more in line with pronunciation on both sides of the Atlantic), the replacement of -re in French loans by -er (centre/center, theatre/theater) and a few other simplications. Movements advocating more drastic spelling reform of English emerged in the 18th century, and there are periodic resurgences of this trend, which represents an attempt to introduce efficiency and save time for new learners.

Benjamin Franklin devised an alphabetic system largely keeping English orthography the same but introducing single symbols for the current digraphs, and additional symbols for vowel distinctions not systematically represented in the writing system. (See link under this essay.) George Bernard Shaw was a passionate advocate of total spelling reform and left his entire estate to be devoted to this project. Systems for extreme changes of spelling, however rational, do not seem to gain much ground in the English speaking world, probably because updating the spelling to match pronunciation would make older documents unintelligible for those learning only the new system, as well as giving trouble as to how to take account of variations in pronunciation. Another objection is that historically-oriented people (admittedly, a minority) would not like to see the history of words containing fossil traces of earlier forms (i.e. antiquated spellings) erased by updating to modern rational spellings. The existing system has now gone on so long that it is difficult to turn the clock back too much at once, but only by doing so can the proponents gain their objective of an entirely rational correspondence between letters and sounds.

Some other European nations make small orthographic adjustments every generation or so, and thus keep their spelling gradually evolving along with (or actually a little bit behind) the pronunciation. The Scandinavian languages are well-known for this strategy. There was a spelling reform in Germany in 1989 or so, but it was not a drastic one, although portrayed as dire by some. Recently major national newspapers have declared their intention to go back to the old system, leaving language users in confusion about which standard to adopt. Modern trends for standardization Current orthography represents two major centers of standardization: British and American English. The British standard held sway throughout the world until very recently, when some other countries began to first accept and then to teach American orthography and lexical choices. (Grammatical features have been adopted with more reluctance it seems.) Pronunciation variants are spread auditorily rather than via writing, but the same changeover from British to American norms appears to be occurring. In the English-speaking world beyond Britain and the U.S., the norms are coming into flux in some places. The spelling usages of former colonies Canada and Australia are undergoing change as the influence of the U.S. is felt more and more.

These countries were tied to the mother country, Britain, longer, and have maintained largely British orthography, but proximity (in the case of Canada) and cultural influence are exerting pressure on the norms speakers choose. The use of U.S. spelling variants seems to be on the rise in the populace in these countries, despite resistance of schools and government. In other former colonies such changes are less obvious, but the same trend may be active. The spread of electronic communication in the form of computers and phone texting have provided a large number of abbreviatory conventions. The enforcers of spelling norms, schools and publishers, have so far maintained the current orthographic standards in printed documents. But because spelling norms are hard to acquire given all the spelling-pronunciation mismatches, and writing has become so democratized through these technologies, the use of non-standard spellings (not just abbreviations) is increasingly widespread. Such changes in usage patterns are bound to have some effect on the written language ultimately, just as speaker's usage of words eventually affects what are considered conventional norms. It is still too early to tell how these effects on the written language will play out.

Publishing itself as an industry feels endangered by the tidal wave of un-edited electronic publication on the internet. What happens to publishing as an industry will probably affect how quickly new orthographic norms are adopted, since publishing is one of the major conservative forces of orthographic standardization in the modern world. The others, schools, government, and church, seem less powerful in determining the form of the documents that are actually produced on paper. Useful Sites on Spelling and Spelling Reform Ben Franklin's phonetic alphabet for reformed spelling. (found by Travis Smith) Benjamin Franklin developed a keen interest in spelling reform and this is his system for a more rational spelling system for English. He even took the trouble to commission a type foundry to make the new letters needed for typesetting in his proposed system. (He was a printer/publisher after all.) He wrote an article about it in 1768 when he was living in London. But then he seems to have lost interest in the project, possibly because he could not interest anyone else in it. Writing system reforms and revolutions (in many languages) .

In addition to links on writing and spelling reforms in a wide variety of languages, this site also includes some nice links to sites about writing systems, the relation of language to writing systems, spelling games and other curiosities, and issues related to spelling reform and literacy. Wikipedia on English spelling reform . An overview of reasons for and against spelling reform in English. The arguments against are under the sections "Obstacles" and "Criticism". There is also a short list of campaigns for spelling reform in English. Wikipedia on spelling reform . An overview of reasons for reform, but arguments against reform are not given in depth. The overall point of view in this article, unlike in the one above, is pro-reform. This site also has short descriptions of reform efforts for a number of languages. [Students: If you have any other links on spelling, send them to me.] © 2009 Suzanne Kemmer American vs. British English BRITISH ENGLISH Or whose language is it anyway? A porter in a British hotel comes upon an American tourist impatiently jabbing at the button for the lift. "Sir, the lift will be here in a moment." "Lift? Lift?" replies the American.

"Oh, you mean the elevator." "No sir, here we call it a lift." "Well, as it was invented in the United States, its called an elevator." "Yes sir, but as the language was invented here, its called a lift." from The Readers Digest Linda Berube, currently a Fulbright scholar in Norwich, addresses the question of who is responsible for the world-wide dominance of the English language: the Americans or the British. "This treatise is written with such elegance as the subject admits, tho not without some mixture of the American dialect, a tract[i.e., trace] of corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be exposed." Samuel Johnson Truly, the Yanks have been taking a beating on the language front for some time now. For H.L. Mencken, Samuel Johnsons observation sums up the "tone [of] English criticism" of the "American dialect" from colonial days right up until the time of Menckens own ground-breaking publication, The American Language, in the first half of this century. It should come as no surprise to Mencken that the "tone" has persisted, and will persist in all likelihood into the next century.

Indeed, in the course of giving talks on the subject of American English to various British groups, I encounter a range of reaction, from good-natured teasing ("what do you call that language you speak over there?") to downright hostility. On a broader level, American English still warrants the attention of journalists, politicians, and scholars alike in the UK, not always in a kindly or objective way. Often it is regarded as an aberrant version of English. Most Americans would object to this latter classification, at least given the postwar global influence of American culture and vocabulary. Still, the rather vociferously-expressed comment from one audience member at a recent talk - "We gave you a perfectly good language. Why cant you speak proper English?" - seems not far removed from Johnsons tone in spirit, however remote in time. Nevertheless, it has to be admitted, as Mencken and other scholars do, that a certain amount of this hostility Americans called down upon themselves, thanks to statements made by the likes of John Adams and Noah Webster.

Adams was just as capable of adopting a superior tone as Johnson: The English language has been greatly improved in Britain within a century, but its highest perfection, with every other branch of human knowledge, is perhaps reserved for this land of light and freedom. As the people through this extensive country will speak English, their advantages for polishing their language will be great, and vastly superior to what the people of England ever enjoyed. One cannot help but hear the slap of a gauntlet thrown down here. There was even some talk of an American Academy, along the lines of the Academie Française, charged with the task of preserving the purity of the language.. Then there was Noah Webster, who regarded the form of English spoken in the British Isles as having been corrupted by the English aristocracy. Webster worked with dogged determination to standardise and simplify the spelling of American English. He excised extraneous vowels: colour/color; favour, favor (although he resisted this change for quite a while in the face of Johnsons example). And he transposed letters, most notably the final -re: theatre/theater; centre/center.

Some of his changes remain an integral part of American spelling, where others have failed to survive (croud, hed, giv, meen etc.). And so the stand-off has continued, and despite the bickering between the two major factions, an international language has been born. And, of course, both sides would lay claim to its current world dominance. Exactly whose language is it, this current lingua franca? Long before the United States became a superpower, it could lay claim to being a "land of light and freedom," there was the British Empire which set its cultural tone on many parts of the world. Earlier still, the British Isles themselves had been subject to invasion by Vikings and Normans/ But, as soon as the English experienced their first taste of relative freedom from foreign dominance, British English underwent a growth surge, most notably perhaps in the period immediately preceding the colonisation of America,. In some ways, the rapid changes in the language represent the movement toward a more unified English identity.

If the Middle English of Chaucer in the late 1300s is compared to Shakespearean English and then again to what begins to be Modern English in the late 1700s, the language is virtually transformed in a matter of only 400 years. Current differences between British and American English pale in comparison: inflection is lost; verb conjugations become more uniform; thousands of new words flood the language, some 2000 alone attributed to Shakespeare. These are only some of the more prominent changes, as on many levels vocabulary, pronunciation, spelling and grammatical structure shift dramatically. At about the time that England was experiencing this linguistic awakening, the spirit of exploration began to take hold. Of course, this exploration and colonization brought English to the Americas, to the southern hemisphere, to Africa, and to South Asia. In fact, India is exceeded only by the United States and the United Kingdom in numbers of English speakers. The role that English literature played, both in its contribution to vocabulary and to its contribution to world literature, cannot be overemphasized when considering the importance of the language. The English Renaissance, Shakespeare, and the publication of the King James Bible particularly assisted the expansion and lent prestige to the language.

And though the United States can lay claim to a literary tradition of its own, that of the British Isles remains unparalleled. Yet, even if the birthplace of the language and the importance of cultural and social contributions are considered, its usefulness as a form of international communication depended on the number of English speakers. True enough, the United Kingdom alone has been in the process of producing these numbers. According to David Crystal, "between the end of the reign of Elizabeth I (1588) and the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth II (1952) this figure [of five to seven million living within the British Isles] increased almost fifty-fold." to include emigrants and descendants. This is an impressive increase, but Americans can justifiably point out that the English language was not much used abroad before its introduction in North America. Only by turning their attention outward could the English make their full impression on the world culturally, linguistically, and politically.

Perhaps Bill Bryson puts it a bit harshly when he states that "...without Americas contribution English today would enjoy a global importance on a par with Portuguese," (would that make India the UKs Brazil?) but it seems reasonable that the almost exponential population growth of the United States, along with its own brand of English, coupled with the ever-expanding nationalistic and cultural activities of the English, were what gave the language its current status as a means of international communication. And what of the English exported to America? It has often been said that the English the colonists spoke was virtually Shakespearean or, more generally, Elizabethan. But, as J. L. Dillard points out, it would be difficult to define what exactly Shakespearean English is, considering Shakespeares own variation in spelling and vocabulary. That it is equally difficult to describe Elizabethan English is evidenced by the varieties of regional dialect which were even more firmly entrenched by the 17th century than they are currently. Actually, the English did not give America "a perfectly good language," but rather a number of good languages or at least variations on a language, and those in a period of rather intense transition.

Instead of the "two streams" or two separate languages that Mencken originally envisaged British and American English to be, it would be more accurate to consider Modern British English to be one result of that period of linguistic transition, and American English to be another. In fact English was not immediately dominant in the colonies: other languages, such as Dutch and French, figured prominently. According to Dillard, English was a virtual "interloper" in some regions, and "had to adapt linguistically." At one point during the colonial period, there were 18 different languages spoken in the Hudson River Valley alone. Scholars have frequently suggested that the later waves of immigration to the United States explain the disparity in vocabulary between British and American English. But it is plainly not the whole story. Nevertheless, with other languages along with the Pidgin English common among Native Americans, slaves, and sailors undoubtedly contributed toward making American English as a different branch from, and not a subset of, British English. Although the United States is not, geographically-speaking, the colonial power that England was, it had some direct role before this century in exporting its own brand of English.

Dillard, citing Creole scholars, Berry and Hancock, maintains that, at least with the founding of Liberia by ex-slave repatriation, "it seems inescapable that, in a real sense, a variety of English that was in some sense American was transported overseas before the period of British domination had ended." Of course, it is in the current century that American English has made its mark internationally. Marckwardt and Dillard highlight the efforts of such institutions and programs as the Fulbright Commission, the United States Information Agency, and the Peace Corps, as exporters of American culture and English. Technology has virtually assured the dominance of American English on a scientific as well as a popular level. With a 250 million-strong block of first language English speakers, and the rise of the United States as a military, industrial, and political superpower after World War II, Americans can certainly claim a prime responsibility for boosting English to world prominence. The above is just an outline of how the two countries have ensured the position of English as the international language. There have been challengers to the title, none successful.

As many gloom and doomsayers as there are predicting the demise of English as the predominant language in the United States, and with as much resistance to English as there is expressed in individual countries, no change in status seems imminent. So, "Whose language is it?" appears to be a question of no pertinence. Crystal would give credit to the United States and its influence in the 20th century, "much to the discomfiture of some in Britain who find the loss of historical linguistic preeminence unpalatable." But, the world dominance of the United States rests partially on what the British had achieved in the 19th century. With as many theories as there have been on the divergence of the "two streams of English," it is still virtually impossible to consider them separately or even sequentially. It is true that the use of English predates the European settlement of America, but it has gained impetus concurrently with the rise of the United States to international status, as well as with the rise of the United Kingdom to that same status. Bibliography

Question: Whose 19th century dictionary standardised US English?
Answer: NOAH WEBSTER